Deeplinks Blog posts about DMCA

Today the Ninth Circuit handed the Internet a bittersweet and crucial victory by affirming a district court's holding that the safe harbors created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protected Veoh, a now-defunct video hosting site, from copyright liability. The case has been pending since 2007, when Universal Music Group (UMG) sued Veoh based on allegedly infringing content in UMG music videos that Veoh users uploaded.

Proponents of the misguided Internet blacklist legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) — downplay the idea that the overbroad bills could be used for censorship. But one only needs to look at the way existing copyright laws have been abused to know there’s serious cause for concern.

Yesterday, EFF asked the U.S. Copyright Office to grant an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for “jailbreaking” smart phones, tablets, and video game consoles. The exemptions are designed to dispel any legal clouds that might prevent users from running applications and operating systems that aren’t approved by the device manufacturer. The exemptions stem from section 1201 of the DMCA, which prohibits circumvention of “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”

On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Stop Internet Piracy Act—where five witnesses will appear in favor of the bill to just one against—a broad group of tech companies, lawmakers, experts, professors, and rights groups have come out against the bill.

The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet. Here is a small sample of what they had to say:

A veritable Who's Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees:

In the past week, the larger Internet community has joined EFF in sounding the alarm about the new copyright bill, now known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as it makes its way through the U.S. House. The bill threatens to transform copyright law, pushing Internet intermediaries—from Facebook to your ISP—to censor whole swaths of the Internet. SOPA could forever alter social networks, stifle innovation and creativity, and destroy jobs, which is why Rep.